What is a knowledge cutoff?

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Knowledge cutoff: The date up to which a language model's training gives it reliable knowledge; anything after it the model can only learn by searching or being told.

Model makers publish it: Anthropic's models overview gives a reliable knowledge cutoff for each current Claude model. Questions about anything newer push an assistant to run a web search instead of answering from memory.

That is one reason assistants search more for fresh topics, prices and news. How AI assistants search covers when each one decides to look things up.

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See the fan-out for your own prompts

Only Fan Out is a free Chrome side panel that lists the queries, fetched pages and cited pages behind each ChatGPT, Claude or Grok answer. Nothing leaves your browser.

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